Half Day of School (That Was Half Good)

Today was the last day of classes at my high school-- next week is exams-- and the day started in a lovely fashion, I played morning hoops and I made my very first shot-- a three-pointer to win the game-- and, after much sweating, fouling, rebounding, and running around-- I made my last shot-- another three-pointer to win the game (and who remembers all those missed shots in the middle? nobody!) and then I walked off the court, happily, and into the locker room, where I showered up and prepared for an easy half-day of yearbook signing (or makeshift yearbook signing since the school collected back all the yearbooks because of the yearbook debacle) and watching "Trini 2 DE Bone" the Hamlet 5.1/alas poor Yorick/Laertes jumping into the grave adjacent Atlanta episode-- but then things took an odd turn: we were watching the eulogies for Sylvia and a student from one of my other classes walked in, and-- some context-- the seniors can be exempt from exams, if they have certain grades or have completed certain requirements, it's teacher's discretion, and its a nice senior privilege-- but this student had cut the last two classes and hadn't taken the test that was required to get an exemption form (which needs to be signed by a parent or guardian) and she came into my room today and attempted to hand me an exemption form and I was like: "what? I didn't GIVE you an exemption form" and she was like "I wasn't here when you gave them out" and I was like "Okay, then you needed to come ask me for a form, not filch one and forge it and then hand it back to the originator and think they forgot that they didn't give you a form?" and then I told her to come back later when I had processed the absurdity of this event-- but she never did-- and then I wrote her up and emailed her parents and now she's coming in on exam day, the only student in that class that is coming in-- so annoying-- and she'll take the 12th Night test and some other exam that I cook up for her . . . and if she would have just asked earlier in the week, I would have told her, take the test and then I'll give you an exemption form but instead she took this oddball road, which is inconvenient to all parties involved (but I had to draw a line in the sand on this one . . . so obnoxious and entitled and just plain silly-- I can't think of the proper metaphor for this: is it like going to the DMV with a license that you made yourself and asking them to certify it? is it like giving your doctor a prescription for opioids that you wrote out yourself?)

Dave Beholds the End of Civilization (and Is Subsumed Into the Matrix)

I apologize for the hyperbolic title, but I'm truly at a loss for words . . . there are no words . . . but fuck it, I'll give it a shot: so let me begin at the beginning: last week, I ran into a spate of uncited AI writing submissions in ALL of the various high school classes I teach-- the same thing happened around the same time last year . . . kids are on good behavior at the beginning of the year, then they get lazy around winter break, then a few kids get zeroes for cheating, and then-- after seeing the consequences-- they shape up again for a few months-- then they get senioritis and fall apart again-- it's a wonderful cycle-- and while some of these uncited AI writing pieces were in my college-level writing classes, which is a serious academic integrity violation and requires all kinds of bullshit: phone-calls with parents; meetings with the students; emails and meetings with guidance counselors; academic integrity forms . . . it's a terrible and tragic timesuck (and both students and parents cry . . . which is both endearing and kind of funny) but I also got a couple of AI-written assignments in Creative Writing class . . . they were downright awful mock-epic stories-- which are supposed to be funny, but AI is NOT funny-- and with these kids I was more lenient-- Creative Writing is a relaxed elective class-- so I admonished them and told them to do the assignment again for half-credit . . . and one of the students who used AI was absent so I sent her a message explaining that I recognized her piece was AI (and so did Chat GPT Zero) and that she needed to rewrite it and this morning, I noticed a reply to my message in my Canvas Inbox and upon reading two or three sentences of this rather long apology for unethical use of AI to write her mock-epic, I noticed that her apology letter for using AI was definitely written by AI and that's when I felt my corporeal body being digitized and sucked into the metaverse-- and I let out a distorted, electronic scream . . . the very same distorted electronic scream that Neo let out when they were locating his corporeal body and he was being digitized and subsumed-- and then, just to make sure, I asked Chat GPT to write an apology note for using AI on an assignment and Chat GPT went right ahead and executed this task, without noting the hypocrisy and irony, and both the message sent by the student and the Chat GPT letter began with the same weird opening: 

"I hope this email finds you well," 

and then the student-- or actually the AI, posing as the student-- expresses "deep regret" and then, and this is where I just need to show you the money-- and I should point out that I would normally never exhibit student work for entertainment purposes, that's just lowdown and mean . . . but this is NOT student work, it's written by AI and it's amazing-- and while the message was longer than this . . . because AI is incredibly bombastic and verbose if you don't give it very specific limits-- this is the heart of it and it's amazing:

Your guidance and support have been valuable, and I want to assure you that your message has resonated strongly with me I am committed to ensuring that our communication reflects the genuine connection and respect that our collaboration deserves. Please accept my heartfelt apology for any unintended oversight. I value our partnership and the trust you have placed in me. Rest assured that I am diligently working on the assignment and committed to re-submitting it no later than tonight. I am grateful for your patience, and I look forward to delivering a thoughtful and meaningful assignment.

and so when I talked to this girl after class today-- and, to her credit-- she told me that she wanted to talk to me after class and I agreed that we'd have to do that . . . and when we met, I realized that she sincerely wanted to apologize and she didn't want the rest of the class to suffer for her mistake and she sincerely wanted to explain to me that she was under a lot of stress and pressure and had a lot of other school work to do and she was sorry that she took the easy way out and that she didn't take the time to do the assignment herself and all that boilerplate-student-crap and I was like: "That's fine, no worries, just don't do it again . . . BUT . . ." and then I asked her the million dollar question: I asked her if she used AI to write the apology and she said, "Yes, I just wanted to send you something to show how sorry I was" and I said, "You know the definition of irony, right? You know how crazy this is-- to send an apology for using AI written by AI" and she seemed to understand that this was an absurd action-- but now I'm wondering if she does know the definition of irony-- and I know if I need to explain irony that I now have the best example in the universe . . .and the saddest part of the story is that if she actually recognized the meta-humor in her action and acknowledged the silliness of using AI to write an apology for using AI, I would have thought it was hysterical and lauded her as the greatest creative writer in history-- but it turns out that she sincerely sent me an AI written apology note for using AI on an assignment, not realizing the hypocrisy of this methodology and I'm fairly sure this is the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse.

Do You Know Your Dog's Date of Birth?

Another beautiful day in the Catskills-- and we ended where we began our vacation, at the Mud Puddle Coffee Roasters & Cafe-- we took a hike out of New Paltz and then got some delicious coffee and breakfast sandwiches (I recommend The James: 2 EGGS, BALSAMIC ONIONS, BACON, GOUDA, ON FRENCH PEASANT ROLL . . . it's the best fucking breakfast sandwich I've ever eaten) and then we hauled it on home because Lola has a UTI and she needed some antibiotics but to save time we had our vet call the prescription in to our local pharmacy so we didn't have to drive to Sayreville but it turns out that in this ever-changing world in which we're living when you try to save time, you might well create a chaotic imbroglio-- so I ended up spending a good hour at our pharmacy today, calling the vet, pacing the vitamin aisles, trying to recall my dog's birthday?-- because you need to give the date of birth to pick up a prescription-- but our vet couldn't get through because they called the wrong number but then when they called the right number-- which I provided-- it was busy and then-- after many phone calls to the vet by me . . . and-- I'm proud to say-- no losing of the patience-- I never lost my patience, I kept it on my person the whole time because my pharmacy was doing a great job and the ladies at the vet, well . . . they were far away and on the phone and I had to be very diplomatic with them-- but in the end, after the pharmacy had to call the vet office to confirm some handwriting and some other shit-- I finally got my ten dollars worth of Sulfamethoxazole and I also had a lovely conversation with the fourth pharmacist I spoke with-- because I spoke with all the pharmacists-- about how to get dogs to swallow pills . . . but seriously, do you know your dog's birthday?

New (To Me) Music

I swore I'd never read another fantasy book and then my friend convinced to give Game of Thrones a shot and I ended up reading them all . . . and I swore I'd never listen to heavy metal music again but Rob Harvilla, on his podcast 60 Songs That Explain the '90s, convinced me to give Tool another listen (I vaguely remember listening to them in the '90s, along with Helmet and Ministry and Pantera) and they are just the right amount of heavy, just the right amount of Spinal Tap, and just the right amount of alternative weirdness for me to enjoy them now, at age 53 . . . weird (I'm also enjoying Waxahtachee very much . . . again-- old news, but I have trouble keeping up with this rapid paced digitally demanding popular culture smorgasbord that comprises our modern lives). 

Fuck Capitol One!

Capitol One double charged us a week ago-- my wife paid $3823 two days early so she could sort out our budget and then Capitol One automatically took another $3823 two days later-- their auto-pay extracted that amount again, even though our balance was zero-- so that our bill was now negative three thousand and some dollars-- and when we called to rectify this, their customer service was atrocious-- NOBODY could do anything . . . apparently they can take your money but they can't give it back-- and the fucking customer service people just read and read from their script and no one could bump you up to anyone with actual power . . . we were finally promised that after an "investigation" they would return the money they stole from us-- at first they said they would return it in the form of a check, but we were like: "you fucking took the money digitally so you can return it digitally" so the rep said he would do that ASAP-- but he was a liar-- and then a week went by and we received nothing so I called again this Saturday-- and now we were in worse shape because our credit card statement no longer reflected that we were three thousand in the negative . . . but we didn't have the money-- and I must point out that we were lucky enough to have enough money to pay our Rutgers bill, as this double-charge was enough money to cripple some families financially-- and the lady couldn't even see that there was some weird payment correction pending and she also had no supervisor working she could refer us to-- so after much yelling she finally figured out that Capitol One had sent us a letter-- a letter!-- informing us that they would soon be sending us a check-- a fucking check, though they stole our money digitally-- and this is obviously because some percentage of people never get the check and never follow up, so Capitol One makes even more money by bilking people . . . so it's going to take a couple weeks (I hope) to get our money back that they stole by double billing us, though they extracted it digitally, so as soon as we get the money we'll be cancelling our account and I implore everyone to cancel their Capitol One accounts and forward this story and tell your friends and family to FUCK CAPITOL ONE because they are crooks with atrocious customer service.

Station Eleven on a Wintry Day is Best

Watching Station Eleven during a blustery snow day is a treat-- when you go out to shovel snow and clean off the cars and walk the dog in the park and then are able to come back inside to a warm house, you can really appreciate how good you have it, especially when Jeevan gets mauled by a wolf in the snow and nearly freezes to death (and wakes up with an amputated leg in a housewares store populated by pregnant women who are all going to give birth on the same day and they think he's a doctor) and I highly recommend watching this show in any weather (although winter is best) and you should also read the novel; the show is episodic and unstuck in time, which allows for weird and artsy moments and lots of characters who you will never meet again, and it is beautifully filmed and acted, a real treat-- it lives up to the motto: survival is insufficient.

Mallory's Oracle

Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connor is a crime novel released in 1994 (to excellent reviews) and the portrayal of New York City and its weird and wonderful and damaged denizens is very different than the more sanitized Big Apple of today-- the titular hero (or anti-hero) has been orphaned twice-- she was a child of the street . . . "damaged" and she "grew up with distorted mirrors" so though Sgt. Kathleen Mallory is beautiful and smart and a computer whiz, but she doesn't realize her looks and talent-- and when the man who adopted her-- another detective-- is murdered by what appears to be a serial killer, she's on the case (though she's not supposed to be) and she journeys through a world of insider trading, SEC investigations, seances, spiritual scam artists, clever and greedy old ladies, magic tricks, Gramercy Park chess prodigies and spacy geniuses-- the writing is sharp, the plot is really complicated, there's one compelling character study after another and there's lots of great dialogue, like this:

“Why did Markowitz tell all this to you and not me?” 

“Oh, you know how parents are. They start to get independent of their children. Then they think they know it all, never need advice, never call the kids anymore. Like it would break an arm to pick up a phone. And you kids, you give them the best years of your lives, the cute years. This is how they pay you back, they take all the horrors of life and keep them from you.”

and if you have the Libby app you can get the book pronto on your Kindle!

I Give Up: Here's a Bunch of Random Stuff From "Why We're Polarized"

I highly recommend Ezra Klein's new book Why We're Polarized for both liberals and conservatives-- and it should be the last thing you read that mentions national politics for a long while; warning, this post is going to be epically long-- because I dog-eared so many pages in the book and then used the Google Doc "voice-typing" tool to input all the information into the computer and while it was pretty fun to read aloud and watch the text scroll, the post is a total mess; you're not going to get accurate quotations, as I didn't take my time, but I'm going to boil down Klein's words into a sort of plagiaristic of Dave/Ezra Klein that is perfectly fitting for this ridiculous blog medium; while Klein is a self-avowed liberal (and usually a vegan . . . but not when he travels) who co-founded Vox and is a regular on the podcast The Weeds, this book is not a liberal paean . . . it's an explanation and the take-away is this: stop following national politics like it's more than a football match or a soap opera and-- if you truly want to enact political change-- start worrying about your hometown and the things going on in the state in which you live-- Jersey pride!-- these are the things you can actually influence; anyway . . . here is some stuff from the book, partly paraphrased, partly with Klein's wording, and partly insane rambling;

1) America used to be full of ticket splitters-- and you knew plenty of ticket splitters-- so you didn't identify too heavily with either party;

2) policy was a mixed bag . . .  Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush signed legislation raising taxes for instance that would be unthinkable in today's Republican Party-- almost every elected Republican official has signed a pledge promising to never raise taxes under any circumstances; Bush also sign the Americans with Disabilities Act into law and oversaw a cap-and-trade program to reduce the pollutants behind acid rain; Reagan signed an Immigration Reform Bill the today's Democrats venerate and today's Republicans denounce; Reagan supported amnesty for illegal immigrants; President Bill Clinton' stance on illegal immigrants was much akin to Donald Trump's position; Clinton launched his administration with a budget designed to reduce the deficit and an all-out effort to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA . . . he famously ran against the left-wing of his own party flying back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a brain-damaged inmate and publicly denounced the rapper Sister Souljah; in 1965 a Democratic president created a massive single-payer healthcare system for the nation's elderly-- but as liberal as Medicare was in both conception and execution-- it still received 70 Republican votes in the house as well as 13 Republican votes in the Senate; Obamacare, by contrast, was modeled off Mitt Romney's reforms in Massachusetts and built atop many Republican ideas relied on private insurance for the bulk of its coverage expansion and it ended up sacrificing its public option but the legislation didn't receive a single Republican vote in either the house or the Senate;1982 Senator Joe Biden voted for a constitutional amendment that would let States overturn Roe v Wade, etc. etc.

3) Policy and ticket splitting is no more . . . it's ALL identity politics on both sides-- and we're going to have to get used to and live with it . . . or maybe not because you probably don't live near people from the other party: House Democrats now represent 78% of all Whole Foods locations but only 27% of Cracker Barrels . . . it's easy to overstate the direct role partisanship is playing in these decisions, and while it's true that Democrats prefer to live among Democrats and Republicans like living among Republicans, people are still people . . . they look at schools and housing prices and crime rates and similar quality of life questions . . . BUT the big decision they make-- or their parents have made-- is whether to live in an urban or rural area . . . and as the parties become more racially, religiously, and ideologically sorted into geographically different areas the signals that tell us a place is our kind of place heightens our political divisions . . . most Republicans (65%) said they would rather live in a community where houses are larger and farther apart and where schools and shopping are not nearby, while a majority of Democrats (61%) prefer smaller houses within walking distance of schools and shopping; that's a preference that seems non-political on it's face but adds to the stacking of identities; 

4) psychology doesn't predict political opinions among people who don't pay much attention to politics, but it's a powerful predictor of political opinions among those who are politically engaged; unengaged citizens vote logically-- they look at what a candidate's policy will do for them or their community, while politically engaged people vote using identity and emotion . . . that's damn crazy and why the best way to think about the presidential election is to ignore it for 3.99 years and then take a quick look at each candidate's platform and decide which platform is better for you;

5) it's a mistake to imagine our bank accounts are the only reasonable drivers of political action-- as we become more political we become more interested in politics as a means of self-expression and group identity; it's not that citizens are unable to recognize their interests, it's that material concerns are often irrelevant to the individual's goals when forming a policy opinion; 

6) politicians are not equally responsive to all their constituents-- they're most concerned about the most engaged people who will vote for them  and volunteer for them and donate to them and the way to make more of that kind of voter isn't just a focus on how great you are-- you need to focus on how bad the other side is; nothing brings a group together like a common enemy . . . remove the fury and fear of a real opponent and watch the enthusiasm drain from your supporters; 

7) it turns out that there's only a weak relationship between how much a person identifies as a conservative or liberal and how conservative or liberal views actually are; one reason policy is not the driver of political disagreement is most people don't have very strong views about policy: it's the rare hobbyist who thinks so often about cybersecurity and who should lead the Federal Reserve-- but all of us are experts on our own identities;

8) Bill Clinton had the same "draconian" stance as Trump on immigration;

9) one study shows that Democrats and Republicans cared more about the political party of a student vying for a scholarship than the student's GPA  . . . partisanship simply trumped academic excellence;

10) another study found that Democrats and Republicans performed better at math when the math skills helped them find an answer that boosted their ideology-- say gun control for liberals-- and the better the person was at math, the dumber they got when getting the problem wrong would NOT bolster their ideology . . . yikes;

11) it's become common to mock students demanding safe spaces, but if you look carefully at the collisions in American politics right now, then you find that everyone is demanding safe spaces-- the fear is not that the government is regulating speech, but that protesters are chilling speech, the Twitter mob rules the land looking for an errant word or a misfired joke . . . in our eagerness to discount our opponents as easily triggered snowflakes, we've lost sight of the animating impulse behind much of the politics and indeed much of life: the desire to feel safe, to know you can say what you want without fear;

12) Klein summarizes the first half of the book thusly: the human mind is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference; it takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity, and once that happens, we naturally assume ourselves in competition with other groups; the deeper our commitment to our group becomes, the more determined we make sure our group wins . . . making matters worse, winning is positional, not material; we often prefer outcomes that are worse for everyone so long as they maximize our groups advantage over other groups . . . the parties used to be scrambled both ideologically and demographically in ways that curbed their power, but these ideological mixed parties were an unstable equilibrium reflecting America's peculiar and often abhorrent racial politics; the success of the Civil Rights Movement and its alliance with national Democratic party broke that equilibrium and destroyed the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic party and triggered an era of party sorting; ideological Democrat now means liberal and Republican now means conservative in a way that wasn't true in 1955; partisanship is in part a rational response to the rising party difference-- if the two sides hated and feared each other less 50 years ago, well that makes sense they were more similar 50 years ago, but that's sorting has also been demographic today the parties are sharply split across racial, religious, geographic, cultural and psychological lines . . . there are many many powerful identities lurking in that list and they are fusing together and stacking atop one another so a conflict or a threat that activates one, activates all of the characteristics and since these mega-identities stretch across so many aspects of our society they're constantly being activated in an era of profound powerful social change; a majority of infants born today in America are non-white and the fastest-growing religious identity is "no religious identity at all"; women makeup the majorities on college campuses; foreign-born groups are rising in population and rising in power and they want their needs reflected in the politics and culture; other groups feel themselves losing power want to protect the status and privileges they've in the past when America was "great" and this conflict is sorting itself neatly into two parties; Obama's presidency was an example of the younger more diverse Coalition taking power and  Trump's presidency represented the older whiter Coalition taking it back;

13) an Essential Truth Klein has learned: almost no one is forced to follow politics-- there is some lobbyist in government affairs who need to stay on the cutting edge of legislative and regulatory developments to do their job, but most people who follow politics do it as a hobby in the way they follow a sport or a band; political journalism has to compete with literally everything else for retention; Rachel Maddow is a war with reruns of The Big Bang Theory; Fox competes with Xbox; time spent reading this book is time not spent listening to the podcast Serial;

14) misperceptions were high among everyone, but they were particularly exaggerated when people were asked to describe the other party; Democrats believe 44% of Republicans earn over $250,000 a year-- it's actually 2%; Republicans believed that 38% of Democrats were either gay, lesbian, or bisexual-- the correct answer is about 6%; Democrats believe that more than four out of every 10 Republicans are seniors-- in truth seniors make out about 20% of the GOP; Republicans believe that 46% of Democrats are black and 44% belong to a union and reality about 24% of Democrats are African American and less than 11% belong to a union; what was telling about these results is that the more interested in politics people were, the more political media they consumed, then the more mistaken they were about the other party . . . it makes sense if you think about the incentives driving media outlets . . . the old line on local reporting was if it bleeds it leads, but for political reporting the principal is if it outrages it leads-- and outrage is deeply connected to identity;

15) people have far more power to influence their mayor, state senator, or governor than they have to influence the national discussion; people should be involved in local politics and be most engaged in the tangible states of the politics nearest to their experience . . . of course you're likely to donate to defeat the politician who serves as the villain in the political dramas you watch rather than some local legislator whose name you can't remember . . . of course the stakes of national politics with their titanic clashes of good vs. evil, the storylines omnipresent on social media and television, dominate consciousness . . . but it's counterproductive;

16) people in America used to identify with their state more than the country-- but this has changed-- and it would have confounded the Founders . . . at the core of this newfound nationalization is an inversion of the founders most self-evident assumption: that we will identify more deeply with our home state and with our country . . . a guy named Hopkins proved this with a text analysis of digitized books-- state identity came up WAY more than national identity until recently. . . so I'm bringing that back: I'm Jersey strong and Jersey proud and Bruce and Bon Jovi and all that shit and the rest of the country can do what it wants;

17) America's political system is unusual in that it permits a divided government and is full of tools minorities can use to obstruct governance; imagine that you work in an office where your boss who you think is a jerk needs your help to finish his projects, but if you help him he keeps his job and maybe even get the promotion and if you refuse to help him, you become his boss and he may get fired; now add in a deep dose of disagreement. . . you hate his projects and believe them to be bad for the company and even the world and a bunch of colleagues who also hate your boss will be mad at you if you help him--  that's basically American politics right now, bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance but the rationale for the minority party is to stonewall; it's a hell of a way to run a railroad, but this was our structure during much of American History because one party was usually dominant enough to make cooperation worth it for the minority;

18) famous political pundits Ornstein and Mann mince no words in explaining that while both parties partake in bipartisanship, the Republicans have gone off the rails, to summarize their words: today's Republican Party is an insurgent outlier; it has become ideological extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all the declaring war on the government. . . . The Democratic party, while no Paragon of civic virtue, is more ideological centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashion through bargaining with Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties . . . 

19) crucially the Democratic party isn't just more diverse in terms of its members, it's also more diverse in its trusted information sources and 2014 the Pew Research Center conducted a survey measuring trust in different media sources, giving respondents 36 different outlets to consider and asking them to rate their trust in each; liberals trusted a wide variety of media outlets ranging from center-right to left: ABC, Al Jazeera, BBC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, The Economist, The Ed Schultz Show, Google News, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, MSNBC, NBC,  The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, PBS, Politico, Slate, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Yahoo . . . conservatives only trusted a handful of sources: Fox News, Breitbart, The Wall Street Journal, The Blaze, The Drudge Report, the Sean Hannity show, The Glenn Beck program, and The Rush Limbaugh Show.


20) Democrats are often derided for playing identity politics, but that is not in truth a difference between the parties . . . Republicans have built their coalition on identity politics as well, but the difference between the parties is at the Democratic candidates are forced to appeal to many more identities and more skeptical voters than Republicans do successful National Democrats construct broad Coalition and that's a practice a cut against the incentives of pure polarisation what national Republicans have learned to do its construct deep coalitions relying on more demographically and ideologically homogeneous voters . . . Republicans, instead of winning power by winning the votes of most voters they win the power by winning the votes of most places

21) Republicans appeal to voters significantly to the right of the median voter but it's forced them into a dependence on an Electra that feels its power slipping away and demands a response the portion it to its fears this is the way in which the parties are not structurally symmetrical and that's why they have not responded to a polarizing are in the same ways Democrats simply can't win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans Democrats can move to the left and they are but they can't abandon the center in December 2018 well into the Trump era Gallup as Democrats and Republicans whether they wanted to see their party become more liberal or conservative or more moderate by a margin of 57 to 37% Republicans wanted their party to become more conservative by a margin of 54 to 41% Democrats wanted their party to become more moderate

22) the relevant factor I'm urging you to pay attention to his identity what identity is that article or Twitter thing or video invoking what identities making you defensive what does it feel like when you get pushed back into an identity can you notice it when it happens you log on to Twitter nine times a day can you take a couple of breasts at the end and ask yourself how differently you feel from before you logged on the ID here has become more aware of the ways that politicians and media manipulate us. There are reams of research showing the reaction to political commentary and information we don't like his physical. Are breathing speeds up, are pupils naira, our heart beats faster. Trying to be aware of how politics makes us feel, what happens when our identities are activated, threatened, or otherwise inflamed, is it necessary first step to gaining some control of the process. That is not to say we should become afraid of our identities being inflamed or strong emotion being Force for its to say we should be mindful enough of what's happening to make decisions about whether we're pleased with the situation sometimes it's worth being angry sometimes it's not we don't take the time to know which is which we lose control over our relationship with politics and become the unwitting instrument of others

24) For all our problems we have been a worse and uglier country at almost every other point in our history you do not need to go back to the country's early years when new arrivals from your drove out and murdered indigenous peoples brought over millions of enslaved Africans and wrote laws making women second-class citizens to see it just a few decades ago political assassinations were routine in 1963 President John F Kennedy was murdered on the streets of Dallas in 1965 Malcolm X was shot to death in a crowded New York City Ballroom in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was killed as was Robert F Kennedy in 1975 Lynette Squeaky Fromme standing about an arm's length from President Gerald Ford aims her gun and fired the bullets fail to discharge Harvey Milk the pioneering gay San Francisco city Supervisor was killed in 1978 President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 the bull shattered rivet punctured alone for much of the twentieth century the right to vote was for African Americans no right at all lynchings were common Freedom Writers were brutally beaten across the American South police had to escort young African-American children into schools as jeering crowd shouted racial epithets and threatened to attack violence broke out at the 1968 Democratic National Convention urban riots ripped across the country crime was Rising the United States launched an illegal secret bombing campaigning campaigning in Cambodia National Guard members fired on and killed student protesters at Kent State Richard Nixon Road a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement into the White House launched an Espionage campaign against his political opponents provoked a constitutional crisis and became the first American President to resign from office by impeachment proceedings this is not a counterintuitive take on American history by the way among experts that is closer to the consensus the varieties of democracy project

25) American democracy was far less Democratic and far less liberal and far less decent than today; Trump's most intemperate outbursts pale before the opinions that were mainstream in recent history and the institutions of American politics today are a vast improvement on the regimes that ruled well within living memory . . . if we can do a bit better tomorrow we will be doing much much better than we have ever done before.

Deacon King Kong: Read It!

Deacon King Kong is the 51st book I read this year-- 2020 was good for something-- and it is the best piece of fiction I've run into in a long while; I'm not going to write a long review-- just read the thing-- but I will post up my Kindle notes . . . my favorite sentences from this fever dream that's exploded from James McBride's brain-- a fictionalized account of the Brooklyn housing project in which he grew up . . . the year is 1969 and it's all going down in this book, which is about urban decay and revitalization, baseball, drugs, race, language and tall tales . . . it is so much fun, even when it gets dark-- and there's some romance and a mystery to keep the plot cooking . . . the book begins with Sportcoat-- the old drunk church deacon, walking up to a young heroin dealer (who he coached as a child) and shooting him in the ear . . . but really the book begins with the mystery of the free cheese:

“Look who’s talking. The cheese thief!” That last crack stung him. For years, the New York City Housing Authority, a Highlight hotbed of grift, graft, games, payola bums, deadbeat dads, payoff racketeers, and old-time political appointees who lorded over the Cause Houses and every other one of New York’s forty-five housing projects with arrogant inefficiency, had inexplicably belched forth a phenomenal gem of a gift to the Cause Houses: free cheese. 

and then there's some backstory on Sportcoat:

When he was slapped to life back in Possum Point, South Carolina, seventy-one years before, the midwife who delivered him watched in horror as a bird flew through an open window and fluttered over the baby’s head, then flew out again, a bad sign. She announced, “He’s gonna be an idiot,” 

At age three, when a young local pastor came by to bless the baby, the child barfed green matter all over the pastor’s clean white shirt. The pastor announced, “He’s got the devil’s understanding,” and departed for Chicago, where he quit the gospel Highlight and became a blues singer named Tampa Red and recorded the monster hit song “Devil’s Understanding,” before dying in anonymity flat broke and crawling into history, immortalized in music studies and rock-and-roll college courses the world over, idolized by white writers and music intellectuals for his classic blues hit that was the bedrock of the forty-million-dollar Gospel Stam Music Publishing empire, from which neither he nor Sportcoat ever received a dime. 

At age five, Baby Sportcoat crawled to a mirror and spit at his reflection, a call sign to the devil, and as a result didn’t grow back teeth until he was nine. 

Sportcoat was a walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle, and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen, in addition to serving as coach and founder of the All-Cause Boys Baseball Team. 

and then-- in contrast to old school Sportcoat-- you've got the corrupted youth:

you've got the Clemens was the New Breed of colored in the Cause. Deems wasn’t some poor colored boy from down south or Puerto Rico or Barbados who arrived in New York with empty pockets and a Bible and a dream. He wasn’t humbled by a life of slinging cotton in North Carolina, or hauling sugarcane in San Juan. None of the old ways meant a penny to him. He was a child of Cause, young, smart, and making money hand over fist slinging dope at a level never before seen in the Cause Houses. 

and the requisite Italian mobsters . . . this is Brooklyn in the late '60s:

Everything you are, everything you will be in this cruel world, depends on your word. A man who cannot keep his word, Guido said, is worthless. 

and various kind of crime:

“A warrant ain’t nothing, Sausage,” Sportcoat said. “The police gives ’em out all over. Rufus over at the Watch Houses got a warrant on him too. Back in South Carolina.”  

“He does?” Sausage brightened immediately. “For what?” 

“He stole a cat from the circus, except it wasn’t no cat. It got big, whatever it was, so he shot it.” 

Where’s the box?” “The church got plenty money.” “You mean the box in the church?” “No, honey. It’s in God’s hands. In the palm of His hand, actually.” “Where’s it at, woman?!” 

“You ought to trade your ears in for some bananas,” she said, irritated now. 

and superstition:

His wife put a nag on him, see, like Hettie done to you.” 

“How you know Hettie done it?” 

“It don’t matter who done it. You got to break it. Uncle Gus broke his by taking a churchyard snail and soaking it in vinegar for seven days. You could try that.” 

“That’s the Alabama way of breaking mojos,” Sportcoat said. “That’s old. In South Carolina, you put a fork under your pillow and some buckets water around your kitchen. That’ll drive any witch off.” 

“Naw,” Sausage said. “Roll a hound’s tooth in cornmeal and wear it about your neck.” 

“Naw. Walk up a hill with your hands behind your head.”  

“Stick your hand in a jar of maple syrup.” 

“Sprinkle seed corn and butter bean hulls outside the door.” 

“Step backward over a pole ten times.” 

“Swallow three pebbles . . .” 

They were off like that for several minutes, each topping the other with his list of ways to keep witches out, talking mojo as the modern life of the world’s greatest metropolis bustled about them. 

“Never turn your head to the side while a horse is passing . . .” 

“Drop a dead mouse on a red rag.” 

“Give your sweetheart an umbrella on a Thursday.” 

“Blow on a mirror and walk it around a tree ten times . . .” 

They had reached the remedy of putting a gas lamp in every window of every second house on the fourth Thursday of every month when the generator, as if on its own, roared up wildly, sputtered miserably, coughed, and died. 

and there's a shooter in the vein of The Wire's Brother Mouzone:

He wanted to say, “He’s a killer and I don’t want him near you.” But he had no idea what her reaction would be. He didn’t even know what Harold Dean looked like. He had no information other than an FBI report with no Highlight photo, only the vaguest description that he was a Negro who was “armed and extremely dangerous.” 

and a romance between an Irish cop and an African-American church sister:

“I’ll be happy,” he said, more to the ground than to her, “to come back and bring what news I can.” 

“I’ll be waiting,” Sister Gee said. But she might as well have been speaking to the wind. 

the dark side of the drugs: 

Men who made their girlfriends do horrible things, servicing four or five or eight men a night, who made their women do push-ups over piles of dogshit for a hit of heroin until, exhausted, the girls dropped into the shit so the men could get a laugh. 

and, finally, a clash of values that is epic and poetic:

"I’m in the last Octobers of life, boy. I ain’t got many more Aprils left. It’s a right end for an old drunk like me, and a right end for you too that you die as a good boy, strong and handsome and smart, like I remembers you. Best pitcher in the world. Boy who could pitch his way outta the shithole we all has to live in. Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That’s a good dream. That’s a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can’t remember ’em no more.” 

He released Deems and flung him back against the bed so hard Deems’s head hit Highlight the headboard and he nearly passed out again. “Don’t ever come near me again,” Sportcoat said. “If you do, I’ll deaden you where you stand.”  

Horror Recommendations for Both the Patient and the Restive

If you're looking for a gothic novel in the vein of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," then give Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger a shot . . . she wrote it in 2009, but you'd never know it-- it's set in the 1940s and impeccably researched and pitch-perfect in tone-- the disintegration of Hundreds Hall and the family that lives in it mirrors the slow and crumbling decay of the noble class in England . . . the proletariat is assuming more political and economic power, at the cost of old and ancient ways, but the dead aren't going to cede power to the working-class quietly; the book is a slow-burn and often frustrating-- especially the budding yet doomed romance-- but I loved it . . . if you don't have the patience for historically accurate neo-Gothicism, then you can check out the Overlord-- it's streaming on Amazon right now-- the film begins as a harrowing WWII action-flick, but soon devolves into a Tarantino-esque Nazi-zombie genre mash-up . . . it's totally entertaining, gross, and fun . . . my son Ian and I both loved it.

Hybrid School: The First Week

Here a few thoughts about teaching my first week of hybrid-model school:

1) hybrid doesn't work very well . . . you can either pay attention to the kids in the room-- and we are tending to have two or three kids in the room-- or you can pay attention to the kids on the little screen, but it's difficult to pay attention to both groups . . . what tends to happen is that the kids in the room become "virtual" kids and they just participate on the screen, and then there's no reason to have them there in the first place;

2) it's hard to hear the virtual kids unless they have a nice microphone . . . one virtual girl told us she learned to sew during the pandemic and that she sewed a "flag" and I told her that a flag seemed pretty easy to sew, because it's a rectangle and she said, "let me go get it" and she retrieved a "frog" not a flag-- which looked much more difficult to sew;

3) it's hard to understand the in-person kids because they are wearing masks, so I'm constantly asking them to repeat things;

4) got two drama kids to do an impromptu scene on the Microsoft teams;

5) a number of us have insanely large classes, I have 31 kids in a college credit writing course-- so this is going to be difficult to manage virtually and grading-wise, and it also ensures that we are never going back to school because-- pandemic or not-- there's no way to stuff 31 seniors into my classroom

6) I'm still teaching elective classes: Philosophy and Creative Writing . . . I'm not sure why if the actual English courses are packed . . . didn't anyone think of this?

7) I'm taking a lot of walks with my in-person kids-- I put the virtual kids to work and then we go outside and discuss the reading like normal humans;

8) my son Ian-- who is a sophomore and is all remote-- was on a virtual "scavenger hunt" and he got his beloved weighted blanket and put it on his head-- as instructed-- and it fell off his head and landed on the laptop-- MY good laptop-- and ripped the screen from the body of the computer . . . Ian was crying and totally regretful and I felt really bad for him . . . but at this rate he's going to go through 90 laptops this virtual school year . . . I did manage to duct tape the screen to the computer, so it works . . . sort of;

9) I've now sent several rambling emails to administration, about class size of the senior English courses courses and about opening doors, courtyards and windows because we are in a global pandemic;

10) Genesis, Microsoft Teams, and Canvas are impressively dysfunctional and unsynchronized; we are doing all our own tech support and trying to get things to clean up and work, but everything is fragmented, disorganized and incomprehensible;

11) in an attempt to organize things, I  deleted all the channels where various teachers are supposed to meet on Microsoft Teams . . . who knew I had this power?

12) I was running late for work this morning because I was filming a video of myself for work;

13) it's fun to break up pretend fights off-camera-- you just get up quickly, bang a bunch of stuff, and then come back and tell the kids you broke up a fight;

14) we need an all virtual day to catch-up . . . this isn't sustainable;

15) people are already getting laryngitis from teaching with a mask on . . . once coachign starts back up again, my throat is going to be raw every day;

16) my eyes are so tired that I feel like I'm going blind;

17) at first I thought the four rotations of in-person kids would give up and go virtual because there are so many 1-3 person classes, which are awkward . . . but the kids I talked to kind of like it because they only go to school every eight days-- so it's like a weird little masked adventure-- but the teachers are masked and teaching EVERY day, for extra long periods . . . it can't last;

18) my own children are enjoying virtual school -- they can sleep until 8:55 and then school is from 9 AM to 1 PM . . . my high school is still making kids get up to attend class at 7:26 AM . . . it's cruel and unusual punishment for a teenager;

19) Stacey almost cried twice today: once because she forgot her laptop charger-- which is now a vital piece of equipment-- and then later in the day when she taught twenty minutes on mute and then had to repeat the entire lesson;

20) I have a girl with a one-on-one aid that accompanies her to my room and I teach this girl in two different classes, but she only comes to school once every eight days-- like all the in-person students-- but her aid comes to my room every day, though the aid doesn't have a laptop yet . . . so the aid mainly just watches me say weird stuff into a computer;

21) East Brunswick Vo-Tech shut down yesterday, so I think we are the only school building with kids in it in the county . . . and so far it has been quite an adventure.

Teach Your Teenager to Think Poker

This spring, during the COVID lockdown, I started playing poker. Low stakes Texas Hold’em. I wanted to keep my mind active, and I was sick of watching Bosch. That guy is a grouch.

So I took up online gambling.

To many of you, I’m sure this sounds like a terrible decision, but I wasn’t alone. Online poker is legal in New Jersey, and the poker sites experienced a lot of extra traffic during the pandemic. This was great for the regulars, the grinders. Easy money. Online poker is tough. There are quite a few seasoned veterans out there, so you’ve got to know what you’re doing. I was lucky not to lose my entire (albeit tiny) bankroll in the first few weeks.

At the start, I thought this was something relaxing and fun I could do in the evening while drinking a few beers, something to pass the time.

If you’re serious about learning to play poker, that’s not how it goes. Instead of cracking an IPA, you’re better off brewing a pot of coffee. This is NOT passive entertainment.

I also found that I enjoyed reading books about poker just as much (or possibly more) than I enjoyed playing poker. These books taught me to think poker. How to assess risk and reward. Compute pot odds. Analyze your position. Bet for value. Read hand combinations. How to control your emotions, and avoid tilting into madness.

And while I might sound like a reprobate, I also learned that you should encourage your kids to gamble. Placing an intelligent wager involves so many necessary skills that children need to hone — especially teenage children — that you’ve got to let them try, even if the populace calls you a corrupt degenerate.

That’s what the populace called Socrates.

If you are going to teach your kids to gamble, teach them poker. I’m sure there are valuable administrative lessons to be learned from managing a fantasy football team and rolling the bones can school you in basic probability (Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski taught us this in The Wire). Still, none of these games require the philosophical and strategic thinking you need while playing poker, Texas Hold’em in particular.

If my son had utilized some poker logic on his epic adventure, maybe he wouldn’t have ended up cleaning all the bathrooms in our house. It’s not like I hadn’t taught him.

If Woody had gone straight to the police . . .

Before my online poker experience, I thought I was a decent poker player. I’m good at math, I like probability and statistics, and I’ve always done well when I’ve played with friends. But playing countless hands online and reading a slew of classic poker books has shown me the many, many holes in my game. Flaws in my logic and thinking. Spontaneously stupid reactions.

I get overly competitive. I make rash decisions. I’m too curious. I’m either too passive or I’m too aggressive. I play too many hands. My bet-sizing is often imprecise. I bet too much. I check too much. I call too much. I don’t bet the river enough. I could go on and on. The best way to improve at poker is through brutal self-reflection. If you don’t analyze your mistakes and play better, you will lose your money. The scoreboard is your ever-fluctuating bankroll.

Some people learn to play poker through repetition, playing countless hands for decades. This works, but it’s arduous and expensive. Some people use videos. There’s a plenitude of resources on YouTube if you’re willing to wade through them. Some people pay serious money to get coached. But I’m a high school English teacher, and so I turned to my old standby: books. I read quite a few. Due to COVID-19, there was nothing but time.

Some poker books are mathematical and tactical . . . works by David Sklansky, Dan Harrington, and Ed Miller. Some are more evocative. British poet Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town is regarded as the best book about poker ever written. It’s stylish and authentic. But it won’t help your game. Tommy Angelo and Phil Gordon are more philosophical and meditative. Gus Hansen’s bestseller Every Hand Revealed is candid and fun, in a goofy sort of way. Lots of exclamation points. In The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death, Colson Whitehead comes across as an existential grumbler. If you want ambiguity, read the essays in Full Tilt Poker. Every author has a different methodology.

The takeaway from the literature is this: poker is an entire branch of knowledge. It incorporates psychology, game theory, statistics, probability, economics, risk assessment, and character analysis. It can get really deep. If you want to hear how deep, listen to an episode of the podcast Just Hands. Jackson Laskey and James Bilderbeck dissect one hand per episode. Thirty minutes to an hour of “nebulous thoughts” on poker strategy and decision-making. They slow downtime, which is the basis of philosophical thinking.

In the moment, whether we are playing poker or living our life, we use heuristics — rules of thumb — to make our choices. We don’t have enough time to deeply analyze every decision. But if we had the time, any moment can get sticky. My point is — whether in cards or life — there’s no formula. It’s more than simply looking at your hand and throwing down a bet.

Like many of you, I was doing a lot of parenting during the pandemic. Certainly more parenting than poker. We all learned that when schools and sports and trampoline gyms are shut down, you’ve got to up your parenting game. There’s no formula on how to do that either.

I tried to encourage my two high school boys to stay active, in mind and body. To finish their remote school work. To read something other than memes and texts on their phones.

My younger son — a shy and reticent freshman who hadn’t hit puberty yet — was unfazed by the pandemic. He got his school work done, played video games and Magic and Dungeons & Dragons online with his friends, and enjoyed sleeping in. Though he was annoyed that tennis season was canceled, he was happy enough to play with me. We found some courts that didn’t close and played nearly every day. Sometimes he wandered around town with his nerdy friend Martin, but he was happy enough watching shows like Big Shrimpin’ and Silicon Valley with the family

He wasn’t worried about missing keg parties or flirting with girls.

My older son, a sophomore, was a different story. He was so angry about losing tennis season that he didn’t want to play with us. It reminded him of all the good times he was missing with his friends on the team. He recently grew seven inches (shooting past my wife and me) and he had something of a social life before the pandemic: he had a girlfriend for most of winter track season, he went to a house party and drank too much alcoholic punch (and consequently spent the night puking) and he was president of the Rocket Propulsion Club.

He was a real teenager.

While he tolerated us (we played a lot of Bananagrams) this wasn’t enough action for a sixteen-year-old man-child. And where there is action — trouble and risk — poker logic is crucial. Right?

This is always the question with an analogy. Does it hold water?

Is poker just a game, or does it have some bearing on reality?

Do pinochle and Parcheesi teach you essential life skills or are they simply ways to idle away the time? How about chess? Is football similar to modern warfare? Is hockey similar to anything?

In The Catcher in the Rye, Mr. Spencer — Holden Caulfield’s history teacher — tells Holden that “life is a game” that one plays “according to the rules.”

Holden disagrees.

“Game my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right — I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.”

I empathize with Holden. Not all analogies hold up. But I’d like to make the case that poker does. Especially Texas Hold’em.

Here’s a quick primer, in case you need convincing.

Old-time poker champion Doyle Brunson called no limit “the Cadillac of poker” for a reason. There’s more on the line, more ways to play, more variation in style, and — because of the “no limit” element — it hasn’t been solved by computers. It’s a miracle of limited, but significant information.

Just like life.

Here’s how it goes. First off, everyone gets two cards, face down. These are your “hole” cards. You see them, no one else does. If you like these cards, you have the option to bet on your hand: invest in it right off the bat. You also have the option to “check” to someone else’s bet — essentially match the bet so you can continue playing. You could also brazenly raise the bet. Or you could do the opposite. You could fold. Quit the hand, before anything wild happens. This decision is yours alone.

That’s the miracle of poker. You can quit before the game even starts. Opt-out. The best poker players are the best quitters. It’s the biggest part of the game. This may sound odd, to those of you who frown upon quitting, but getting out when the getting out is good is a real skill.

We often tell children “quitters never win,” but there are many advantages to quitting that are often not promoted. The Freakonomics episode “The Upside of Quitting” explores this theme.

Now, if you’re sitting at the table, you can’t completely avoid betting. Twice per round, you are forced to bet a little bit. These are the antes. The small blind and the big blind. Otherwise, there would be no risk at all to play and you could wait forever for a pair of aces. The blinds ensure that if you don’t eventually play, you will lose all your money. You’ll be blinded out. So if you are at the table, there’s always some risk. But you can leave if you like. This isn’t Russian roulette with Robert Deniro and Christopher Walken in a Vietcong prison camp. You can always walk away from the table.

After the initial round of betting on your two hole cards, then the dealer “flops” out three shared cards. Everyone can see these. So you’ve got shared information and private information. You weigh this and decide if you want to bet, check, raise, or fold. The way the other people bet, check, raise and fold reveals information about their hands. This could be accurate information or they could be bluffing, representing cards they don’t have. You have to decide. Be careful of peer pressure, you don’t want to bet just because everyone does. You need to like your hand, at least a little bit.

Another card is turned. This card is called “the turn” because it can turn the tide of the hand. There is more betting. You can still quit! Although, mentally it gets harder to quit once you’ve come this far because you’ve put some of your hard-earned money into the pot. You want that money back, but it’s not yours any longer. It’s up for grabs. It’s hard to accept. We’ll get more into this logical fallacy later. But remember, the best poker players are the best quitters.

At any time during this process, in “no limit” Texas Hold’em, a player can bet all their money. The nuclear option. Most poker does not operate like this. There is a limit to how much you can bet. It makes it easier to compute the odds of winning the hand, versus the percentage of the money you need to bet. This “all-in” option in Texas Hold’em is what makes the game so indeterminate.

You may be able to figure out the percentages of drawing a flush, but can you figure out the percentages of the human mind? You may be able to imagine what a rational being would bet, but what about the lunatic on your right? How about the genius on your left? Is that a regular guy with a good hand, a super-genius utilizing combinatorial game theory, or a spoiled dilettante with a giant trust fund?

There’s no way to know for sure.

After the turn, one more card is revealed, for a total of five shared cards. This card is called “the river” or “fifth street.” This is the card that can make your hand. Or you can fall off the cliff, into the river and be swept away. Sold down the river. It’s an apt metaphor for this essay.

Now there are five community cards and two private cards. You choose the best five of the seven to make your hand.

The best hand wins the pot. I won’t get into what beats what . . . if you don’t know that a full house beats a straight, then I’d like to invite you to a Tuesday night Zoom poker game.

Now let’s extend the analogy in a general way. For many people, life during the pandemic was similar to playing poker.

Most of us were making calculated bets all the time. Getting together with friends in the backyard? A small bet. Outdoor seating at a restaurant? Maybe a little bigger. Playing tennis? Marching in a protest? Visiting a crowded beach? Reopening school? Who knows? All different amounts of risk and reward. Different amounts of pleasure, different amounts of action and excitement and different risks of contracting COVID.

Of course, there were old people and immune-compromised people who had to sit the game out. Some essential workers were forced to put their immune systems on the line for eight hours every day. For these people, the pandemic was not a game.

But for many of us, it was. Getting plastered in a crowded Miami bar turned out to be an all-in bet. The nuclear option. Big fun, but it’s also the highest risk to get the virus.

You could always fold your hand. If the party got too crowded, you could leave. Opt-out. If there were hordes of people inside Costco, you could come back some other time. Play another day.

My kids were playing some pandemic poker.

My younger son was playing it pretty close to the vest. Lots of online stuff. Sometimes he’d go out walking or play some tennis. Small bets.

My older son was running every day with a couple of friends. He was going over to Rutgers with his buddies and doing Rocket Propulsion stuff. He was playing video games in his friend’s backyard. Also smallish bets.

But like I said, my older son Alex was a real teenager. Half man, half child. He needed more action than that.

On a hot day in June, he went over to a friend’s house, ostensibly to play Spikeball. Thunderstorms were in the forecast. The lockdown had been going forever. No school, no organized sports, no graduation parties, no hanging out in an air-conditioned house with friends.

Around noon, Alex called and told me the two older boys — seniors — had decided to bike to Princeton. Alex was going as well. They were going to take the towpath (a.k.a. D & R Canal State Park) from New Brunswick to Rocky Hill and then bike into Princeton proper and eat lunch. It’s a long way there. Twenty-five miles. And then you’ve got to get back . . .

I told him this wasn’t a great idea and listed the reasons:It was too late in the day.
It was hot.
The forecast called for thunderstorms.
He wasn’t wearing spandex bike shorts . . . he would chafe.
He was using his younger brother’s bike, which was too small for him.

Essentially, I was explaining that this was not a great hand. Sometimes, you’ve got to be patient and wait for another.

Pete Townsend explains this in the song “It’s Hard.”

Anyone can do anything if they hold the right card.

So, I’m thinking about my life now . . .

I’m thinking very hard.

Deal me another hand, Lord, this one’s very hard.

I didn’t tell him he couldn’t go. I just clearly laid out the problems. I assumed he was bluffing. This is one of the holes in my poker game. I often think people are bluffing, pretending that their awful hand is good. I assume they will come to their senses soon enough. I want to see what happens because I think I know more than they do.

This kind of curiosity is costly.

Most of the time, people are sincere about their bets. Bluffing is counter-intuitive and feels wrong. People generally believe their hand is good enough, even if their hand is bad. They just think it’s better than it is.

My wife asked, “Did you tell him he could go?”

“I’m not sure. I think he’s going. I just told him it wasn’t a great idea.”

My wife shook her head. She hates my wishy-washy parenting. But there’s no rule book for these situations.

I should point out: this is a kid who never bikes anywhere. God knows why, but he’s opposed to biking. He likes to ride his skateboard. He borrowed his younger brother’s mountain bike for this adventure, which was too small for him. So I assumed he’d be turning back sooner rather than later.

I should have considered his company. Alex was a sophomore, and he was going on this adventure with two athletic seniors. Guys about to graduate, guys ready to leave home and go to college. Guys with a bigger bankroll than my son. There might be some peer pressure to not fold.

When Kenny Rogers sang “You got to know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em” he skipped all the psychology. You’re not playing in a vacuum. There’s pressure not to fold them! Your friends never want you to fold them. They want to see some action. Especially some action with your money. Vicarious action.

I told Alex he could turn around at any time. He was NOT all in. I would put the bike rack on the van and pick him up anywhere along the route. No problem. I would give his friends a lift as well, if they wanted to bail. I could fit all three bikes on the rack.

I figured at some point on this ride — or perhaps even before they set off — he would fold his hand. It was a bad hand, for the reasons I listed above. But I wanted him to figure that out.

Alex told me that they packed some food and plenty of water and some rain gear.

Helmet?

No helmet.

The Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park Trail is a flat path that lies between the Raritan River and the canal. It is all called the tow road because mules used to tow barges and canal boats up and down it. The canal is just a foot or two below the level of the path, but there are often cliffs down to the river. It’s not dangerous in the daytime — the path is well kept. There are occasional ruts and roots, and plenty of poison ivy on the sides of the path, but no terrain that warrants a helmet.

The no-helmet-bet is one worth making on this kind of trail. The chance you’re going to fall and crack your skull is minuscule. The pleasure of the wind in your hair is definite. And it was hot.

When’s the last time you fell while riding a bike on a straight path?

At the start of their trip, luck was on their side. They got a good flop. They made the long haul to Princeton without mishap, and the storms didn’t hit until they got into town. They grabbed some lunch, waited out the rain under an awning, and then decided to take the bus home.

They were giving up on the turn, and that was fine. Typical of so many poker hands. You open with a big bet, continue to bet on the flop, and then take stock of the situation and decide to fold. Quit before things get too intense. They could do the entire fifty-mile there-and-back-trip some other time.

My wife and I were happy with this decision, it was getting late and we figured we were going to have to drive to Princeton to give Alex a ride home. The bus was a great call. Saved us a trip in the car. The bus was supposed to leave at 6:15 PM.

I texted Alex at 6:20 PM to see if he had caught the bus. No answer. Twenty minutes later, I got a text. They missed the bus. They had decided to bike home. I called him and told him he wasn’t going to make it before dark. He insisted they would make it. If not, he said, they would get off the towpath and ride on the road. He said that his friends had flashlights. Alex did not have a flashlight, nor did he have a light on his bike.

He also wasn’t wearing a helmet, so we didn’t want him to ride on the road in the dark. We told him once it got dark, that we wanted him to stop riding the tow road — regardless of what his older friends were doing. He agreed to this. A couple of hours later, it got dark. We got in touch with him. Alex said they were near Manville — about ten miles from home — and we instructed him to get off the tow road at the nearest exit. There was a D&R Canal Trail parking lot right in Manville. We hoped to find him there. We headed west in the minivan, traveling parallel to the canal.

This where poker becomes a psychological game. Logically, he should have backed out. Folded. He had put a lot of time and effort in, it was a lot of fun, but it was over. Pitch black and he was riding along a river. But many people — including myself — often have trouble leaving an interesting hand. You’ve invested so much. People throw good money after bad. Alex decided to go all-in on the river. This was a bet we didn’t want him to make, but circumstances pressured him into it. This happens sometimes. You should know when to fold’em, but when no one else is folding their hand, sometimes your last card doesn’t matter. You blindly bet the last card because you are married to the bet. You can’t back out . . . even though you can. How could he leave these two senior boys? They were pot-committed into biking from Highland Park to Princeton and back, and they were going all-in. Alex told us they discussed the risks and rewards of this play. He knew he was going to get grounded, but wanted to make the entire trip. This is what separates the best players from the good players. They can back out of a hand even when they’ve invested a great deal of time and energy into it. Alex knew the right thing to do but still couldn’t bring himself to do it.

So my wife drove the van, while I navigated a route as close to the river as possible. I texted Alex. No answer. And he didn’t have his phone location on. We lost touch with him. He wasn’t at the Manville parking lot, so we started driving around, finding places where the canal path intersected with the road. I could see the path through the trees, and occasionally make out the silhouettes of fishermen or hikers. No group of kids on bikes, though. It was getting darker and darker.

We were hoping to stumble on him at one of the bridges or park entrances, but no such luck.

My wife and I both certainly had some grim thoughts running through our heads. While the path was easy enough to navigate in the daytime, at night it was a different story. There were roots and occasional potholes and it was surrounded on both sides by water. There were steep drops to the river, which was rocky. The canal is deep. And our son wasn’t wearing a helmet. If he fell, hit his head, and slid into the river or the canal, that would be an ugly situation.

My wife decided if we didn’t get in touch with him by 10 PM, we were calling the police. I agreed.

We finally heard from him at 9:30. The nick of time. He told us they had screwed up the location and were closer than they thought, well past Manville. We found him and the other boys in Johnson Park, which is a mile from our house.

Alex was grounded for the week. He had a list of chores longer than his arm (sometimes it’s nice when the kids get in trouble).

It’s too bad because he almost didn’t get into any trouble at all. He would have had a great story and been on an epic adventure, and suffered no consequences. He just needed to use his poker logic.

I told him this was a situation where he “stayed married to the bet” and “threw good money after bad.” One of the most important things in Texas Hold’em is to be aggressive — to go for it — and then if you know you are beaten, get out of the hand. Fold. He did the reverse, he went all-in with a questionable hand.

Alex understood this. He made a sequence of bad decisions, starting with taking off towards Princeton at noon. But if he quit the sequence at any point . . . if they all turned around earlier, if they took the bus, if he got off the path and called us with his location before the sun went down, if he did any of those things, he would have been a hero. When you make a really difficult fold, they call it a “hero fold” because it’s so difficult to back out of a situation like this. Understanding this and actually making the fold are two very different things.

This is what he needed to do . . . he needed to recognize he was with two eighteen-year-olds that were headed to college and didn’t have to live with their parents for the foreseeable future. They could go all-in with fewer consequences. They had a bigger bankroll. The peer pressure got to him, and that’s fine. It happens. I did plenty of stupid stuff like that as well when I was young. There were plenty of times when I should have folded them, but I didn’t.

So Alex paid off his bet, cleaning cabinets in the kitchen, weed-whacking, etc. Maybe he learned a lesson? I also didn’t mention that his buddy Liam — the younger brother of the senior wrestler — wisely decided to stay home. He didn’t even play that hand. When you’re dealt a lousy hand, sometimes you fold immediately — you don’t get on a bike on a hot humid stormy day and head to Princeton without a helmet. But then, of course, you’re not gambling. And what fun is that?

Alex Goes All-in on a Bike Ride to Princeton

Yesterday, just before noon, my sixteen-year-old son Alex called and said he was biking to Princeton with a few of his friends. They were going to take the towpath (a.k.a. D & R Canal State Park) to Rocky Hill and then bike into Princeton and eat. It's a long way. Over twenty miles (each way).

I told him this wasn't a great idea and listed the reasons:

1) it was too late in the day

2) there were supposed to be thunderstorms

3) he wasn't wearing biking shorts

4) he didn't have the proper kind of bike for this long of a ride

He ignored my advice and I didn't forbid him to go; he was with some fairly responsible and athletic kids-- two seniors, one a tennis player,, the other a runner and wrestler. I didn't want to discourage him, but I had my doubts. Alex's friend-- the younger brother of the wrestler-- wanted no part in a 40-plus-mile bike ride that was starting in the heat of the day. He wisely decided to stay home.

But Alex took off with the two older kids. He said they were prepared, with food and water and rain gear. I told him he was an idiot and wished him luck. I should also mention that Alex hates riding a bike, never uses his own bike, and borrowed his brother's bike because that's actually in decent shape.

At the start of their trip, luck was on their side. They avoided the storms, made it to Princeton, ate lunch, waited out the rain, and then decided to take the bus home. My wife and I were happy with this decision, as it was getting late and we figured we were going to have to drive to Princeton and give him a ride home. The bus was supposed to leave from Princeton at 6:15 PM.

I texted Alex at 6:20 PM to see if he had caught the bus and he told me they were biking home. I  called him and told him he wasn't going to make it before dark. He insisted they would and said if they didn't, then they were going to get off the canal path and ride on the road. He said that his friends had flashlights. Alex had no light and was not wearing a helmet, so we didn't want him to ride on the road in the dark. We told him once it got dark, that we would drive and pick him up. He agreed to this and when it started to get dark, we called him and he said he was near Manville.  We told him to get off the towpath and we would grab him. We headed west in the minivan-- traveling parallel to the canal-- towards Manville.

Catherine drove, and I navigated and texted Alex. No answer. We totally lost touch with him. We were driving around in the dark, finding places where the canal path intersected with the road. I was looking over at the path when I could see through the trees and we were hoping to stumble upon him at one of the bridges or park entrances. It was scary and frustrating, mainly because he wouldn't answer his phone.

I had some grim thoughts going through my head, especially because of this tragedy that just happened near us.

I didn't tell my wife about that incident, but we certainly both had the same thing in mind. The path was dark, full of roots and potholes, and surrounded by water. Often there are steep cliffs on either side. And our son wasn't wearing a helmet. If he fell, hit his head, and slid into the river or the canal, that would be an ugly situation.

We finally heard from him around 9:30. My wife was going to call the police at 10 PM, so it was in the nick of time. He told us they had screwed up the location and were actually closer than they thought, well past Manville. We found him and the other boys in Johnson Park. 

Alex is grounded for the week and has a list of chores to complete longer than my arm. It's too bad, because he almost didn't get into any trouble at all. He would have had a great story and been on an epic adventure, and suffered no consequences.

I've been playing some online Texas Hold'em lately-- I read a bunch of books and learned how to play (very) low stakes poker. I also learned a lot of poker lingo and analogies.

I told him this was a situation where he "stayed married to the bet" and "threw good money after bad." One of the most important things in Texas Hold'em is to be aggressive-- to go for it-- and then if you know you are beaten, get out of the hand. Fold. It's the great thing about poker. If you're smart enough, you can quit at any time. You can quit the hand before the stakes get too big. Unless you have the nuts, you don't want to get pot committed, or you're going to go all the way with nothing.

I think he sort of understood this. He made a sequence of bad decisions, starting with taking off towards Princeton at noon. But if he quit the sequence at any point, if they all turned around earlier, if they took the bus, if he got off the path and called us with his location before the sun went down, if he did any of those things, he would have been a hero. When you make a really difficult fold, they call it a "hero fold."

This is what he needed to do . . . he needed to recognize he was with two eighteen-year-olds that were headed to college and didn't have to live with their parents for the foreseeable future. They could go all-in with fewer consequences. They had a bigger bankroll. I think the peer pressure got to him a bit, and that's fine. It happens. I did plenty of stupid stuff like that as well. 

So now he's paying off his bet, cleaning cabinets in the kitchen, weed-whacking, etc. Maybe he learned a lesson? He was so close to not getting into any trouble . . . and then there's his buddy, who did the wisest thing of all. When you're dealt a lousy hand, sometimes you fold immediately, don't get on a bike and head to Princeton at noontime on a hot day, and relax in the AC. But then, of course, you're not really playing cards . . .

No Good Dave Goes Unrewarded

It looks like my stint as a community service pandemic shopper is coming to a close. While there were occasional rewarding moments, I'm happy that this chapter of my life where I pretend to be a good person is over. Unlike my wife, I don't think I'm cut out volunteering for things that are not directly tied to my own self-interest (or the self-interest of my kids, wife, friends, students, etc.)

Of course, it also might have been luck of the draw. She's been shopping for a lovely and grateful Trinidadian woman who lives in the senior community building in our town. The woman regales my wife with stories, dirty jokes, and thanks. My wife truly enjoys doing things for this woman.

I've been shopping for a laconic older gentleman who seems to be something of a shut-in. He lives on the second floor of a house divided into three apartments. An old lady with an eye-patch lives on the first floor. I think she's the landlord. She doesn't approve of all the diet soda and iced tea that my guy buys each week.

I think it's time for my guy to get out and about. He lives right around the block from Stop'n Shop and he mainly eats soup, pineapple chunks, crackers, and lunch meat. They've removed the one-way arrows from the aisles in the store, so I think restrictions are loose enough for him to go for it. He needs to see for himself that there is no such thing as "Medium" eggs. These days it's all "Large" and "Extra-Large." 

I don't think he understands that I'm a volunteer and that I don't get paid to buy and deliver his groceries (though I've told him this . . . the graduate student that lives upstairs next to him understands this and has been appreciative of my service and the lady with the eye-patch understands the deal as well). 

So we parted ways today with nary a thank you. And his emails have been getting a little weird. I'll give you a sample, so you know what you're getting into when you volunteer for community service. It's not all medals and parades.

Here's a recent one . . . so he's discussing a receipt from two weeks ago:
 

I went through the register receipt for the groceries you bought on 5/22/20. On the bill from Stop’n Shop on 5/22/20, This item was rung up 3 times—I don’t know what it was. SB is the code for Store Brand: SB.CD.HMST.CHKNN 1.19. Also, on 5/22/20, this item was rung up twice—CMP is the code for Campbells: CMP.GRFORCK.FRN 1.89. I don't know what that item was. The Campbell’s products I bought were rung up elsewhere.

This is what I wrote back:

Not sure what to tell you about this. I don't know the codes for various soups and this was two weeks ago, so I don't think we're going to be able to figure it out. I'll try to make sure that nothing is rung incorrectly-- I'm not sure how this happened or if it was some other kind of soup that got rung up, as they don't always have exactly what you ask for so I try to get something close.

I really love his reply to this. He carefully explains how to go to a grocery store and purchase items, though I've been shopping for him with some measure of success since March!

In the store, I ask that you stay with the cart containing my products. Then watch the cashier's moving belt observing the products on it so that only my products are there. When the cashier is scanning the products, see to it that only my products are scanned. Hopefully, your vigilance will be enough to prevent this problem from happening again.

I'm really proud of my tone in the reply. I tried to channel Saul Goodman, when he was lawyering for all the old folks. He was always patient, good-humored, and empathetic. Never sarcastic.

You got it. I will keep an eye on things and make sure nothing gets rung up twice or mixed together with any other products.

I really wanted to throw around the word "vigilance" in my reply. Especially in regard to Italian Wedding Soup. But I didn't. I rose above it. 

While I'm not going to rush out and volunteer for anything in the near future, I'm happy that I did some service. Before the pandemic, I never went to the grocery store. I was awful at it, so it was easier for my wife to go.

But today, I whizzed through the store, grabbing the stuff on my old man's shopping list like a pro: liverwurst here, bananas there, diet root beer in this spot, reach down for the applesauce, grab a few pears, etc.

Fast and fearless. 

When I look at the guy I was shopping for, I certainly think: there by the grace of God goes I . . . but perhaps learning to navigate the local grocery store is a step in the right direction for me to avoid that fate.

Is the Stock Market Fake News? Is Your Consciousness Fake News? Who Knows?

Planet Money Episode 995: Buybacks And Bailouts is a winner. The podcast dissects the viral debate between CNBC anchor Scott Wapner and billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya. The Canadian venture capitalist believes that the U.S. federal government should let the airlines fail and not be particularly concerned if hedge fund investors lose their vacation homes in the Hamptons.

What follows is his logic.

Over the past decade, large businesses have made enormous profits. With those profits, you have two choices:

1) You can use the money to improve the company itself. You can pay employees more. You can invest in R&D. You can save a pile of cash for emergencies.

2) You can give the money to investors, making the stock more valuable. You can do this with dividends, or the more recent financial engineering miracle . . . stock buybacks. You take your profits and buy lots of company stock. Then you make that stock disappear, increasing the value of the remaining stock.

Obviously, you can also balance the two, but Palihapitiya believes that great companies do more of number one. They are visionary and look to the future.

The airlines did a lot of number two. So did many companies in the S&P 500. According to Palihapitiya:

Since 2009, the 500 companies in the S&P 500 - so these are the 500 best companies in the world - they bought back $7 trillion of stock and/or issued dividends. OK? That turned out to be more than 90 cents of every single dollar of profit that they made over the last 11-plus years.

So why bail these companies out? They haven't looked to the future. Mainly, they've made the rich richer. Palihapitiya thinks it is abominable that only five cents of every dollar in the stimulus package has been handed to individual Americans.

Now, the stimulus money will find its way to some individual Americans; those that have money invested in the stock market. Because the money will serve to prop up the market and prop up stocks in companies that executed buybacks. So the rich will get richer. And folks not heavily invested won't see much money.

I can see both sides. I want my retirement savings to stay solvent. I want my pension to exist. But I know I'm one of the lucky folks, even if I'm not a billionaire. There's plenty of people who don't own stocks, don't have retirement money saved, and don't have a pension. They need cash. They may not get it . . . or get much. Meanwhile, big businesses will.

Here is a piece of the video. Definitely listen to the podcast first.




In other podcast news, somewhere in the middle of this conversation between Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari, they explain why I bought Donna Tartt's The Secret History on Amazon the other day. Harari claims that the AI algorithms used by Google and Amazon and Facebook would have known he was gay years before he discovered this. Amazon knew I would buy Tartt's novel for $1.99 . . . a great deal! They knew better than me what I wanted. Now I'm happy reading it, though I would have never remembered about it with AI assistance.

Is this a good thing?

Who fucking knows. The same goes for the bailout.

What Is the Cost of a Quarantine Bagel? Maybe Dave's Life . . .

On Tuesday at his daily press briefing, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that the economy and public health are not an either/or scenario. He's right, of course. An increase in public health is going to help the economy. But he also said something that's patently false. 

“But if you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy then it’s no contest, no American is going to say accelerate the economy at the cost of human life because no American is going to say how much a life is worth.”

This is logical silliness. We HAVE to put a value on human life. It can't be worth nothing-- then you're Stalin. It can't be sanctified and worth an infinite amount, because then you can't allocate resources. 

Plenty of Americans say how much a life is worth. Americans that work in federal agencies that decide whether a regulation is too costly to enact. Car manufacturers say how much a life is worth when they decide which safety features to add to their vehicles and which to leave out (and how much to charge for them).  Actuarial workers say how much a human life is worth on a daily basis.

Professor W. Kip Viscusi says how much a human life is worth. He gets specific about it.

Often, these federal agencies rely on Viscusi's number. Back in 1982, one statistical human life was worth 300,00 dollars, but Viscusi revised this figure. He used data on dangerous jobs-- he looked at how much more a worker needed to be paid to accept a job that had a higher risk of death. He came up with three million dollars per statistical life-- ten times the old amount. Because of inflation, that number is now estimated by the federal government to be around 10 million dollars. 

Planet Money Episode 991: Lives vs. the Economy give an excellent rundown of this math (along with an interview with Viscusi himself!)

And that's why I was able to go and get bagels yesterday morning. We haven't completely shut the economy down. We are still allowing people to shop at Wal-Mart and get take-out food and go to the grocery store as many times a week as they'd like. We're still delivering and receiving mail. We're still ordering from Amazon. 

Do these things spread the virus? 

Absolutely, but at a lower rate than normal. But not at a rate of zero. If one human life were priceless, we'd have to shut it all down. We'd get one chance every two weeks to go to the grocery store. We'd be eating beans and rice. By leaving some businesses open, we're making a cost/benefit decision and putting a price on the lives that will be lost because social distancing is fairly voluntary. And imperfect, as you will learn at the end of this post, when I describe my journey to buy bagels.

We'll keep making these decisions, balancing public health and the economy, and recognizing that plenty of people WILL be deciding what a statistical human life is worth. That's why the speed limit isn't 15 miles an hour. If it were, we would save many many thousands of lives, but we've decided that those lives are worth time and convenience. How many statistical lives are 50,000 jobs worth? I don't know, offhand, but someone is going to have to make that decision. The same way we know opening bars will lead to some drunk driving deaths and some cirrhosis of the liver. And some spread of Covid-19. At some point, that number will be low enough that we will reopen. But it's never going to get to zero.

Some people are better at minimizing the risk than others. That's baked into the system. I don't seem to be very good at minimizing the risk. 

Yesterday, I went to the La Bagel in Edison. I put on my mask, picked up our order, and carried it back to the car. The place was busy: four customers and four people working. One of them was a uniformed health care worker. Everyone wore masks, but still. The virus is around.

I got my bagel toasted and with cream cheese. I had never gotten my bagel toasted before, but my wife gave me this option. La Bagel is only a four-minute ride from my house (three minutes, really, because there's no traffic) but I decided I needed to eat my toasted everything bagel with cream cheese NOW. In the car on the ride home. I was hungry.

I didn't realize that the cream cheese would be slightly melted from the toasting. I got cream cheese all over my hands. I licked the bulk of it off-- which is probably not proper pandemic hygiene. Then I put the bagel down on the console so I could find some napkins. After getting the napkins out of the bag, I noticed that I put the bagel down on a pair of used gloves. Also probably not proper pandemic hygiene. But I ate it anyway, of course.

In the next few minutes, I got cream cheese on all kinds of surfaces, including my mask. I licked my fingers clean and ate a bagel that had touched my mask and some gloves. 

I'm not a doctor. 

I don't have this protocol down pat. I'm like most people. And we still have a whole mess of people behaving like this, so the virus will spread, slowly. Hopefully, slowly enough. But this is a tough adjustment for me. 

I'm used to teaching in a classroom all day. Kids cough on pieces of paper and then hand them to me. The desks are sticky and gross. There's never enough tissues. I touch my face, pick my nose (you can't teach with a booger) and cough all kinds of droplets into the air. I'm used to seeing one or two sick kids in every class I teach. They slobber on the desks and blow their noses. And I don't even want to get into the bathroom passes . . . yikes. This is business as usual when you do five 45 minute classes a day. There's no way we're going to be able to control the situation inside the schools, but we're eventually going to open the doors anyway. 

Here are a couple of other good podcasts on this topic:

Making Sense with Sam Harris: 198

Freakonomics 413: Who Gets the Ventilator?